Charleston in Black and White

For historians of the United States, especially those drawn to examining its political and social mechanics in practical daily operation over time, South Carolina has provided an indispensable laboratory. Nearly fifty years ago, Peter H. Wood brilliantly resurrected the Stono Rebellion of 1739 as an event of absolute centrality in a continuing struggle with deep resonances and consequences for the nation (Peter H. Wood, Black Majority, 1974). For the first half of the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois systematically attempted to demonstrate the profoundly purposeful politics as practiced by a newly freed people. Du Bois's efforts were, of course, thwarted by a racial and ideological system of segregation (coded especially to systematically harass the “black” as well as the “red”) that kept him from the archives he would have mined so brilliantly if he had been given an equal chance. Since then, Wood, Thomas C. Holt, Julie Saville, and numerous others took on the historic task that Du Bois had been unable to complete, even as they found themselves occasionally refuting some of his key theoretical assertions

Aesthetics · Art · Black Power · Civil rights · Ideology · Movement (music · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Race (biology · Sociology · South carolina · White (mutation · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society